The Long and Faraway Gone (8 page)

 

J
ulianna planned to buy DeMars dinner—­she owed him a dozen dinners. When she called to invite him out, though, he said he'd pick up some ribs and bring them over to her place. She knew why. He wanted to snoop around, check the fridge, peek into the bedroom and make sure her bed was made.

She opened the door and gave him a hug, a kiss on the cheek.

“Go ahead, Detective,” she said. “Check the fridge. Fruits and vegetables. Fresh towels in the bathroom. I am one together girl.”

He chuckled. “Let's eat these ribs.”

It had been more than a year since she'd seen him, but he looked the same as always. The ramrod posture, the gleaming brown head, the goatee flecked with silver. He'd had the silver in his goatee—­no more, no less—­when Julianna first met him, fifteen years ago. He'd inherited Genevieve's cold case when the original lead detective retired. He'd inherited Julianna.

“I can't believe Mayla is almost fourteen,” Julianna said. She knew better than to talk business when Charlie DeMars was eating.

“Birthday in a few days. Almost tall as me.”

“And how's Angela? Is she counting the days?”

“Says she is.”

“Wait till you're home all day, in her way. Underfoot. See what she says then.”

“You right, you right. But how about you? There any young gentlemen in the picture I need to know about?”

He'd been trying for years to marry her off. Trying to set her up with the straight-­arrow sons of his friends, lawyers and landmen and architects. But Julianna had been in a real relationship once, a few years out of nursing school, and it had ended badly. It had started badly, with Julianna losing interest almost before the boxes were unpacked.

“Julianna,” Eric had always pleaded, “I want to understand you.”

He was a nice guy. Julianna felt bad for him. She'd tried her best. She and Eric had lived together for almost a year before he finally recognized he was trapped in a burning building.

“At the moment, no,” she said to DeMars now.

DeMars finished his ribs and stole one of hers. “So you doing all right, I see.”

“I've been doing all right for a long time now, DeMars.”

“I know.”

He was probably the kindest man Julianna had ever known. She wished she could spend the rest of the evening chatting about his daughters, his golf game, Kevin Durant's newly developed jab-­step move. Julianna knew that nothing would make him happier.

“I think I might have something,” she had to say instead.

He didn't sigh or frown or shake his head wearily. “All right.”

“You remember Abigail Goad's statement.” She was the rancher's wife from Okeene, the third of the three eyewitnesses who had seen Genevieve after she left Julianna. She was the last person who saw Genevieve before she vanished from the face of the earth.

Genevieve had left Julianna outside the rodeo arena at dusk, approximately 7:30
P.M.
At approximately 7:40
P.
M.
, the first eyewitness—­Genevieve's friend Lacey, who they'd run into half an hour earlier—­saw Genevieve again, on the midway. The second eyewitness was a corn-­dog vendor. He told police who canvassed the fairgrounds that he'd seen a woman fitting Genevieve's description around 8:00
P.M.
, farther down the midway, hopping over a pile of hydraulic cables and cutting behind a ride called the Himalaya. Although, on second thought, maybe the woman had blond hair instead of brown. And, on third thought, maybe it was the Ferris wheel, not the Himalaya. Maybe it was closer to 7:30. When he'd been pressed—­Julianna read the cop's notes from the original interview—­the corn-­dog vendor admitted that yes, he and the rest of the crew at the corn-­dog stand had burned a doobie or two earlier in the evening, and yes, that might conceivably have compromised his recollections.

But the third and last eyewitness—­Abigail Goad, a rancher's wife from a small town in western Oklahoma called Okeene—­was precise and matter-­of-­fact. She'd seen Genevieve on the other side of the fairgrounds, in Food Alley, the area where most of the food concessions were concentrated. She gave police a detailed description of Genevieve and described exactly what she had been wearing: jeans, sneakers, and a white
BORN IN THE USA
T-­shirt. Abigail Goad had noted the T-­shirt in particular because that morning there had been a letter to the editor in the
Daily Oklahoman
about how rock and roll was the devil's music and how the state legislature should bar Bruce Springsteen if he ever tried to make a tour stop in Oklahoma.

Abigail Goad remembered the time exactly, too, a few minutes before 9:00
P.M.
She had been on her way to meet her husband and sons beneath the Space Tower. They had gone to look at the antique cars while she browsed the Made in Oklahoma Building.

“You remember how Abigail Goad said Genevieve was talking to a man in a cowboy hat,” Julianna said.

“
Might
have been talking to a man in a cowboy hat,” DeMars said.

The rancher's wife from Okeene had been fastidious in the interview she gave police. If she wasn't absolutely certain about something, she made sure to say so.

“
Might
have been. Okay.” Julianna set her laptop on the table. She scrolled down the “Remember When in OKC” Facebook page until she found the photo. She clicked to enlarge it. “Look.”

DeMars leaned over. The photo had been taken at night. In the foreground, blown out by the flash, a woman in her thirties grinned as she bit into an egg roll. Behind her was a food trailer with a sign that read—­in red letters that were supposed to look like Chinese characters—­
YUM YUM FOO!

The photo caption said
“Fair Food 9/20/86!”

“That's where Abigail Goad saw Genni,” Julianna said. “Food Alley. I remember that Chinese place.”

She remembered the
smell
of the place. Hot grease, burned meat, ginger, and garlic. Julianna had wanted the fried sweet-­and-­sour pork for dinner, doused in an orangish sauce that looked excitingly radioactive, but then changed her mind at the last second and had an Indian taco instead.

“All right,” DeMars said.

“Keep looking.” She knew he'd already seen the man in the cowboy hat. At the edge of the frame, his back to the camera, standing in line at the barbecue trailer next to the Chinese place.

“Juli,” DeMars said. “Come on, now.”

“Half the guys at the fair had cowboy hats. Right? And we don't know what time this photo was taken. We don't even know what night, really. The caption could be the wrong night.” The State Fair of Oklahoma ran for eleven days in 1986, from Thursday, September 18, through Sunday, September 28. Genevieve had disappeared on the first Saturday night of the fair. The police had not begun to canvass until Tuesday. “But just listen to me. What if this photo really
was
taken on the night of the twentieth? What if the lady who took it has other photos, too? She must have, right? And what if in one of those photos we can see his face? The guy in the cowboy hat?”

Julianna didn't say it aloud, what else she was thinking:
What if in one of those photos we can see
her
?

When Genevieve disappeared, cell-­phone cameras were twenty years in the future. Otherwise Julianna would have had hundreds of online fair photos to pore over, thousands of them, each dated and time-­stamped, each individual flash illuminating some dark corner of that night.

Julianna could close her eyes and see that
BORN IN THE USA
T-­shirt like it was right in front of her. Genevieve had bought it at a concert in Dallas the year before. A lot of her friends were into metal and thought Bruce Springsteen was faggy. The headband he wore, the stupid dancing on MTV. But Genevieve had been a fan before he became so popular, when his music was muddy and brooding. On the album cover for
Darkness on the Edge of Town,
he looked scrawny and grimy and haunted, like someone who could have lived down the street from them.

“All right,” DeMars said. “What if ?”

He meant that it didn't help them—­so what if they found a photo with the face of an anonymous man in a cowboy hat? They'd never be able to identify him. They'd never be able to find him. Abigail Goad had passed away in 1988, after a stroke, so they would never even know for sure if he was the man that Genevieve had been talking to. That she
might
have been talking to.

But Julianna refused to think that way. You had to open every door and see what was behind it. DeMars, as kind and smart as he was, didn't understand that. This was his job. It was just a job.

“Maybe I'd recognize him if I saw his face,” Julianna said. “Maybe he was someone Genni knew, or someone we'd seen earlier. He could have been following us. Or maybe the lady who took the photo remembers something about him. Maybe she saw something.”

DeMars slowly smoothed a hand over his silver-­flecked goatee and waited. His hands were big, the color of some rich, dark wood.

“I sent her a message on Facebook,” Julianna said. “The woman who posted the photo. But that was a week ago, and I haven't heard back. So I thought there might be something you could do.”

“Juli.”

“DeMars, just—­”

“Listen to me now. You been talking.”

“Fine.”

“We do this, don't we? Every year or two.”

“This?” There was more poison in her voice than Julianna intended. DeMars pretended not to notice.

“You want an answer,” he said. “I understand that. But there's not an answer. There'll never be an answer. It's been twenty-­six years. Your sister is gone, and you are here. That's the only answer there is. You are here.”

They sat in silence. Julianna closed her laptop and timed her breathing to the slow green pulse of the sleep-­indicator light.

“Oh, DeMars.” She smiled. “You think I'm still that girl. I'm not.”

“All right.”

At certain points in her life, Julianna's obsession with what had happened to her sister—­with finding an
answer
—­had threatened to consume her. But now she had a life and a career. Friends. Fresh towels in the bathroom.

She felt so angry, suddenly, that she wanted to pick up her laptop and smash it against the wall. Because who was to say she
shouldn't
be consumed by what happened to Genevieve? Not Detective Charles DeMars, for whom this was just a job. Fuck him.

She smiled again. “All I wanted, De Mars, I just wanted a favor. I thought you might be able to do me a favor. If you can't, no problem. No hard feelings.”

He was an excellent cop and could read her mind. She guessed he would try now to put her on the defensive, on her heels.
You don't think I care about all this, Juli? You don't think I care about you?

Julianna didn't understand why he hesitated. “What?” she said.

He smoothed his hand over his goatee. “Crowley popped up.”

For a moment she didn't register the name. And then, for an even longer moment, she didn't register what DeMars was saying.

“What?”

“State system flagged him, so they let me know. Because the investigation's still ongoing, officially. He applied for a job down near Chickasha, so they ran a background check. The Indian casino down there.”

Julianna was so surprised she felt as if she were in a dream, the kind where you tried to run but couldn't move, where you tried to cry out but couldn't speak.

Crowley. Christopher Wayne Crowley. She hadn't thought about him in years. He was the carny who worked at the booth where Julianna won her stuffed Pink Panther. Early on, in the first few days after Genevieve disappeared, he'd been the primary suspect in the case—­the only suspect, really, the only solid lead. Julianna told the detectives how he'd flirted with Genevieve and invited her to meet him later. Genevieve, at the time, probably thought Julianna had missed all that, too enraptured by her new Pink Panther to notice. Julianna, of course, missed nothing. It was Genevieve she had been enraptured by, and she monitored her big sister's every breath with fascination.

Crowley had been arrested twice before, once for possession and once for assault and battery. The police picked him up and questioned him for hours. He denied at first that he remembered Julianna, then denied that he'd ever invited her to come by his trailer. Finally he admitted that he'd invited her but swore she never showed up. He'd been disappointed when she hadn't.

The police couldn't find any physical evidence in the trailer or his car, but they were certain he was lying. Julianna had seen the official transcripts of the interview. She remembered a handwritten note about Crowley that some cop had jotted in the margin of the transcript:
“Lies like he breathes.”

Crowley stuck by his story. It was Abigail Goad, the rancher's wife from Okeene, who cleared him. She saw Genevieve alive and well at 9:00
P.M.
in Food Alley. Ten minutes earlier, at a 7-­Eleven store a block from the fairgrounds, Crowley had been arrested for trying to shoplift a six-­pack of beer. He spent the night in Oklahoma County Jail.

So much for the one suspect, the one solid lead.

A year later Crowley was convicted on another drug charge, in Tennessee. Julianna, fourteen years old, a freshman in high school, found the address for the prison and wrote him a letter. Even though Crowley could not have murdered Genevieve, Julianna was convinced he knew more about what happened that night than he'd told police.
Lies like he breathes.

He didn't reply to that first letter, or to any of the others she sent him. The last few, in the winter of 1991, were returned with a stamp on the envelope that said the addressee was no longer in custody. Fitch, the detective who had the case at the time, checked for Julianna. He found out that Crowley had served his full sentence and been released without condition: no parole officer, no forwarding address, no trace.